When the rains don't come: El Niño and the crisis unfolding in Borneo

 

It takes five and a half hours by boat across the Bakun reservoir to reach Long Jawe, a remote indigenous village on the reservoir's furthest inlet.

When we arrived, our boat driver's dogs came down to meet him. They were up to their necks in mud, trudging through it to reach the bank.

In this work, it's usually the scale of forest destruction that leaves me breathless. This time, it was something else.

I've just come back from Sarawak, where haze from fires across the border in Kalimantan has choked nearly the whole island of Borneo. Watching those dogs wade to shore, it was hard to shake the feeling that we are all up to our necks in this now.

On the ground, I experienced heat stronger than I've ever felt, a sky thick with pollutants, and water levels in rivers that connect communities falling to trickles.

Cities across Sarawak are reporting air quality at "Very Unhealthy" levels, alongside thousands of cases of hazardous-air-induced illness.

El Niño is bringing unusually dry and hot conditions to the region as a whole. In Kalimantan, fires set to clear land for oil palm are thought to be the leading cause of the uncontrollable burns now being exacerbated by drought.

But the severity of the impact in Sarawak has been shaped by decades of logging, land clearing, and monoculture planting.

Drought is devastating rivers that have already been made shallower by sedimentation, drying out fragile forests that have already been degraded, and further disrupting communities whose livelihoods depend on these resources.

When I visited Long Jawe, the scale of damage brought by a combination of land degradation and drought was stark. Years of large-scale logging upstream have filled that inlet with silt, leaving it shallower, muddier, and hotter.

El Niño is making an already difficult situation significantly worse.

What is happening?

El Niño is a natural climate cycle in which warm water pools in the eastern Pacific, shifting rainfall patterns across the globe. As that warm water moves east, the rainfall that normally sits over Borneo and the rest of island-rich Southeast Asia moves with it, and the region dries out.

The event now developing is exceptionally strong, with sea surface temperatures already more than 2°C above normal and forecasts pointing to this El Niño becoming the most powerful on record.

Borneo has experienced severe El Niño events before. The droughts of 1997–98, 2006, and 2015–16 brought catastrophic fires, haze, failed harvests, and rivers too low to navigate.

What adds fuel to the fire is the damage the landscape has experienced. Decades of industrial logging, oil palm expansion, and peatland drainage have reduced the capacity of forests and soils to retain water and protect waterways.

Logging roads and cleared slopes increase erosion, sending sediment into rivers. Over time, that sediment accumulates, changing the depth and character of the waterways that communities depend on.

Research in the Bakun region has documented the effects of logging and land-use change on stream ecosystems.

Separately, studies of the Bakun Dam system itself have found water-quality problems tied to the dam, including declining dissolved oxygen under some operating conditions.

The river at Long Jawe

Long Jawe was one of the villages that refused to move when the manmade floods came from the construction of the dam. The people who stayed are completely reliant on the water around them.

The mud those dogs were wading through is one visible impact of logging on the river. Cleared slopes and logging roads send huge volumes of silt into the water, making the river shallower, muddier, and hotter.

With less water coming down, there is less to carry the silt away and less to dilute it. Residents report frequent fish die- offs, likely the result of the silt, which lowers oxygen and carries debris and chemical pollution from the logged slopes upstream.

Fishing has become unreliable in a village that depends on it. And when the water drops, boats get stuck in the mud, cutting people off from their most important method of transportation.

The dams are drying up

Sarawak has staked its energy future on mega-dams. This year, that gamble is being exposed.

By June, the Batang Ai and Bakun reservoirs - cornerstones of the state's electricity supply - had fallen to drought emergency levels, with Murum close behind.

The state government resorted to cloud seeding over the dam catchments in an attempt to coax rain from the sky.

These dams were built at enormous cost to indigenous communities, who were displaced from ancestral lands by the floodwaters that accumulated to create the dam's reservoir.

Communities were told that their sacrifice would deliver abundant, reliable power. But hydropower is only as reliable as the water flowing into the reservoirs, and that water is becoming less predictable.

Long Jawe makes the contradiction plain. The community chose to remain in its ancestral territory rather than be relocated, and it is still living with the consequences of a river system the dam transformed - now compounded by logging, sedimentation, and an increasingly severe dry period.

Refusing to move did not mean escaping what the dam did to the water.

Cloud seeding while cutting down forests

For decades, indigenous communities in Sarawak have fought to protect their ancestral forests.

In the nearby region of Ulu Baram, communities have been developing a conservation initiative since 2009 - the Baram Peace Park - aimed at permanently safeguarding some of the last primary rainforests outside of totally protected areas.

But in 2024, the Sarawak government quietly handed out a logging concession covering more than 100,000 hectares within the proposed conservation zone, effectively killing the project and restarting mass-scale primary forest logging.

The contradiction in Sarawak is difficult to ignore. The government is cloud-seeding over emptying reservoirs, trucking water to communities facing shortages, and responding to worsening haze, while continuing to permit the clearing of forests - their main tool to help regulate watersheds and protect rivers.

Forest loss does not cause El Niño, but it determines how severely communities experience it.

Indigenous and rural communities are the first to feel the consequences, because their livelihoods and basic infrastructure are so closely tied to forests and rivers, and because many are already living with environmental damage that predates this season.

The answer is not complicated, even if implementing it is politically difficult: keep the forests standing. Allow them to regenerate.

Indigenous communities across Borneo have been saying this for decades. Intact forests hold moisture, protect watersheds, and sustain the rivers that communities depend on. Forest protection is climate adaptation.

The rains will eventually return. The question is what will still be standing when they do - and whether we choose, this time, to address the causes rather than merely endure the consequences. - Mkini

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JESSICA MERRIMAN is the project and campaign coordinator for the Borneo Project.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.